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Gaming / Media PC required, can someone help? make recommendations?

8y, 8m agoPosted 8 years, 8 months ago

HI all!

I'm Looking looking to buy a new PC. And I need your help :) as I haven't been keeping up to date with the latest graphics card and processor market.

I use a lots of graphics and photo editing application, such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom. I don't do any gaming, simply put my PC cant handle new games and is very sluggish when using the photo editing tools (photo file sizes are usually 8mb + ) and its a bit tatty.

I was thinking of buying a Mac and dual booting XP, but i want to play all the new games, as I'm a PC gamer at heart.

I'm looking spend around £1000 - £1300, I'm stuck on what Graphics Card, Processor and Motherboard to get - can anyone make any recommendations? don't afraid to be technical :)

Basically i want a bad ass high performance PC at the best price, anyone know any good sites? or maybe Ebay seller? I dont really want to buy from DELL, EBuyer unless they offer a good deal.

they let you customise a desktop pc from scratch. If you multitask a lot then you may want a quad-core which would be well within your budget, if not then dual cores are just as fast when using single threaded applications. Intel cpu's tend to be faster at this moment in time and are therefore my recommendation. The current top of the range cpu's include:

The 8 and 9 series are the latest processors from intel and run incredibly fast, but cool.

Moving on to motherboards that suit these processors, most current Intel-based motherboards use the PGA775 socket type, so are compatible with all current processors(although some may need a BIOS flash for the newer CPU's), the current top-of-the line chipset's include the p35, x38, x48. The chipset basically determines the features that the motherboard has. The main benefits of the x38 and x48 chipsets are that they can handle higher bus speeds, crossfire(2 graphics cards running alonside each other), and natively support ddr3 RAM. It's of course entirely up to you if you want to use these features, and if you aren't too bothered about using them then the p35 chipset would be a good choice for you. Some of the top motherboards that currently feature these chipsets include:

p35:
ASUS P5K
Gigabyte P35-DSR
Abit IP-35

x38:
ASUS Maximus Extreme
ASUS Maximus Formula
Gigabyte X38-DS4

x48:
ASUS P5E3
ASUS Rampage Formula

Moving on to the graphics cards, ATI and Nvidia both produce single and multi-gpu cards that perform extremely well. Nvidia cards generally perform better on a cost-to-cost basis with their ATI counterparts at the moment, and the best "Bang for Buck" card out today would be the 8800gt. These are priced similarly to the ATI HD3870XT but perform considerably better. If your budget stretches, look at the 8800gts 512mb, which is slightly better than the GT. If you want even better performance you will need to look at multi-gpu solutions such as the HD3870X2 or the 9800GX2. Both of these cards are extremely fast, with the 9800gx2 being slightly faster. IMO, only buy these if you can afford it, and game at high resolutions.
The current line-up from ATI and Nvidia currently includes:

Also bear in mind you will need a suitable power supply to run these components. I would suggest at least 620- 800w. The website's Forsaken has listed would be an excellent start to sourcing these components, just look for the cheapest and best you can afford.

The lists of components I have provided are IMO the best components you will get for your budget, in the order they are shown.

If there's anything else I may have missed or you need to know, just ask :thumbsup:

FYI if youre going to do a lot of photo editing etc youre better off with a quad core. If mostly focused on gaming, youre better off with a dual core with higher cache

Id agree with jaz on the processor and MB front . You can get the higher end versions of those MBs e.g. P5K deluxe, Abit IP35-Pro depending on the specs you need . Youre prob better off sticking with Nvidia GFX 8800gt 512 should be more than capable of running most if not all current games at max resolution (you may need a slight overclock for Crysis)

I'm in the same situation as you, I've got a gaming PC that's about a year past it's best before date and I'm looking to get a new PC with a budget of about £1000.

Does your budget have to include monitor, speakers etc. or just the base unit?

The graphics card market is looking a bit medicore right now, even the highest end cards will struggle to run two or three games on a £200 24" monitor with all the settings turned up and the 8800 GTX that's a year and a half old is still competetive and even considered a somewhat decent deal, probably because all the newer ones are the same card with slight tweaks.

The new cards look to be coming out by the end of this year, some sources are even saying as soon as June so one option might be to wait a few months. Intel's Nehelm, the sucessor to the core 2 is also supposed to be coming out at the end of the year, although that'll probably start at £500+ high end chips.

If you do want to get a PC now then quad-core seems to be the way to go, either the Q6600 or the Q9300 even in games they seem to be eclipsing the dual-cores. For graphics cards the 9800GX2 seems pointless on a new computer, an SLI motherboard with 2 8800GTs, or GTSs will be around the same speed and substantially cheaper. The 8800GTX is about the same speed as the GT/GTS but does scale better. How many games it'll make a difference in before low frame rate hits I don't know though.

The ATI solutions can't quite keep up in games, although they do have the advantage of being able to combine an X2 or multiple graphics cards with multiple monitors. (nVidia's SLI won't show more than one monitor when it's enabled). They also have more comprehensive hardware video processing than nvidia's solutions but with a new CPU that won't make any difference.